


The Dying Time

by 9_of_Clubs, drinkbloodlikewine



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, Endings, Future Fic, Heartbreak, Loss, M/M, Pain, Seperation, The Unbearable Love they share.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-24
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2018-02-06 02:38:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1841251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/9_of_Clubs/pseuds/9_of_Clubs, https://archiveofourown.org/users/drinkbloodlikewine/pseuds/drinkbloodlikewine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will's fingers twitch, curl into fists and release, again and again. Scrutinized, observed, absorbed without Hannibal even needing to look at him, reading the vibrations of Will’s voice and his energy as though they were airwaves to a radio, though always, always, one that works both ways.<br/>--<br/>Post finale, and pre-capture, Hannibal knows it's over, has all but given himself up, but he wants one more dinner with Will before he goes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dying Time

**Author's Note:**

> We set off to write something that would make us cry and instead unlocked a pain more brutal along with the tears. <3

“Hello, Will.” 

He knows Will is there without turning, without need to look back, without speaking or sight. His presence enough - the quiet ways in which he floats into the spaces inside of Hannibal, shades them whole with no permission or need for it, slips through unlocked doors to claim what is his already, lingers in the raw places.

And with a breath Hannibal is whole. The ever present throb of loneliness dragging to a pause, making way for a different ache altogether.

In truth, he has known, perhaps for days now, that he would not be leaving this place freely. He has seen traces of the FBI hovering, but not acting, around the small town, hoping, he suspects, to avoid bloodshed. Once, he may have paused to take stock, curled his lips, and run, fled beneath their noses, punished them for their audacities in his wake.

But he has been waiting. 

And for a very long time now, it seems. For what may as well have been an excruciating eternity, and so he had not run, he had calmly continued his days as they have been, indulging in all the fine luxuries that would soon be taken from him, which, in truth, have lost all flavor in his mind, and registered even less so as the bated breath began to draw. The precipice on which he lingered consuming him wholly, stealing his sleep, possessing his mind, the twining thread that flows between them, always, yanking taut. A palpable shift in the air.

And now, the time is 7:30. Will is here, and Hannibal waits no longer. 

“Have you called for them yet?” There’s a polite curiosity twining through his tone, filled out with the brittle emptiness of ice, something wild beneath, with hope, perhaps, with despair, or rage, too soon to know exactly. “Has the dying time begun already?” 

A tight smile in response. It passes as quickly as it appears and never reaches Will’s eyes.

“No.” He knows better than to delay his answers now, has learned that lesson in blood. “I haven’t told them. They don’t know I’m here.”

This, a confession that could end in a resolution much like the last, left alone in warm darkness pooling beneath him. Still, he makes it. 

Will takes a breath, takes in the house as though it were of interest, as though he hasn’t seen it at length and from countless angles of surveillance. Quaint, compared to the house they once shared. Smaller rooms in lighter colors, a particular brightness to it that seems at odds with the darkened gaze he feels leveled upon him.

“I wanted to see you,” he adds, softly.

“Did you?”

A question for a statement. Will speaks in truths now, facts that he offers with all the certainty he lacked when last they spoke. For a heartbeat, the room shifts around him, around them both, fills with the tangy sweetness of blood and Will lies on the floor, gasping, so loud in Hannibal’s ears it might be real. He turns his cheek from that. Gazes out the window instead, watches the clouds shift in the sky.

“You’ve always seen so well.” A bird flies past, the wind brushes through a tree in yard, a taunt of life and Will is there as he has awaited, and hoped, imagined, seen in feverish dreams. Will behind him, time dwindling no matter his words, and Hannibal cannot bear to look back at him, a clench of unmistakable agony twisting him. To find his eyes and know, not again, not for a long time. “Tell me, Will - what do you see now?”

“Resignation. Fear. Not of what’s coming but of your own acceptance of it.” Will draws his lower lip between his teeth, sucks it thoughtfully.

“Relief.”

His fingers twitch, curl into fists and release, again and again. Scrutinized, observed, absorbed without Hannibal even needing to look at him, reading the vibrations of Will’s voice and his energy as though they were airwaves to a radio, though always one that works both ways.

“I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t want to see you.” Another admission, and Will feels his control slipping from between nervous fingers. He swallows, forces a hand through his hair, all the tells of a deep, thrumming anxiety that Hannibal knows in him intimately. “Why did you invite me? You know what’s going on. You have to know.” Both of them aware this time.

“Why?” The word echoes in response and Hannibal turns finally, drags his eyes away from the now familiar sights that suddenly hold sparks for him, of beauty, of longing, and turns them to the only being he’s ever really seen at all. They hover around Will before they find him, inhale his presence as a drowning man might air, a terrible roar around his ears, splotches of color dancing dizzy around the image, a terrible faintness emerging and he laughs.

“So that we may sit, and eat, and I will feel the warmth of your skin beside me, hear the cadence of your voice unaltered, reach out perhaps and feel the shift of your body beneath my fingers. Have a memory to hold onto that is not dusty with time, ragged from constant remembrance, for the grey places you intend to send me - ” He pauses around the words, as though they scratch cloying at his throat, but the truth of them rings too terribly to deny. “Alone. You may only indulge in memories so often, I have found, before the yearning for more grows too great.”

His hands fall open at his sides, no knives this time, no weapons with which to end lives, bring breaths short. To kill Will now, a smile curves at the inside of his mouth, aching and horrible, would only be to kill himself, that is what this absence has taught him. Would only make the thin thread of potential life an impossibility. “I am giving myself over for this, do you understand? Or do you truly believe I could not have run forever, if I set myself to it?” 

There’s a dawning weakness in him that makes Will uncomfortable to look upon, a yielding give that he knows he’s caused, so unbearably human in someone whose very existence has always been so otherworldly.

“Of course you could,” There’s surprise in the tone, genuine. “I was certain you would. Twist and turn and leave room for us to make errors, to lose the trail.”

The word - _us,_ ringing clear - strikes Will as suddenly strange, to use it reference to any but themselves. He brushes the feeling away and moves closer, eyes darting to the empty hands that open palm out to him, a residual wariness that draws tight through the scar stretching skin across his stomach.

“Yes.” Hannibal steps back as Will draws forward, their dance not quite done. “So easy it would have been, so very foolish and over confident. You’ve waited, a few more lives at my feet, a new identity around my shoulders.” Will’s face contorts before him, the words from his lips strangely imploring, fear twisting his eyes. “I asked you, when we last spoke. If you thought to take my life, assumed such a thing would be different than my freedom. In the end there has been no freedom and no life. Perhaps we both failed to understand which fates would be crueler.”

He turns from Will, misses the way hands clench again behind him, unclench. The sensation of warmth imagined beneath them, of tracing familiar lines and curves, of grasping and caressing softly in something that still feels like adoration.

Admiration.

Will forces a sigh, nearer now, enough to reach out. It doesn’t seem like much to ask, dinner and company, but to yield what Hannibal asks of him - what Will wants for himself - will bring them that much closer to separation.

“What did you make?” A soft-spoken question, asked many times before, as though the world weren’t waiting to crash down around them both.

Hannibal still standing, frozen, pauses over the plates he has made, different in kind than the ones that they echo, but in similar simplicity, in the faint notes of wanting they hold, a desire for a beginning, long fled, when in truth, there are only endings at hand. “A protein scramble.” His lips curve, the echoes of old conversations filling his ears, the notes of something flitting through, so dangerously like regret it rustles up unnamed loathing in his stomach. “To start the day.” 

He checks his voice, keeps it flat, but Will’s feelings are not so easily restrained, and a shuddering sigh escapes him - laughter, almost, if something so empty of joy could be called that.

Words threaten to pry themselves free, throw themselves against Hannibal in the same desperate frenzy he feels pulling at his own body now, but he the impulses back, restrained instead to grasp the back of the chair. Will seats himself, unsteadily.

There will be time for all those words, he starts to tell himself, that it isn’t now, here, like this, and another small sound catches on a breath as Will realizes how deeply his own denial runs.

“I missed you.”

The words explode onto Hannibal’s back, as though the other had hurdled stones, as though he had hurled daggers, cut jagged into the planes of his body, his muscles tensing, fingers clenching onto the counter. For a minute, the rage roils again, savage, a desire to hurl the plates against the wall, to twist the breath from everything living he encounters, to set the world aflame or perhaps, only all of those things to himself.

He picks the eggs up silently and brings them to the table, seats himself, should pick up the fork, should eat the meal, should allow this moment to come and go without damage further, but he cannot. And instead he finds his fingers reaching across the divide, curving slow around skin that is no longer his, along the body he will have to surrender, that will be denied to him for as long as he is imprisoned and longer. Dancing agony like fire, to lose a heartbeat.

It would all be bearable, in some ways, the thought flits through his mind, abhorrent, if only he could have Will. But this is the one sensation, the one being, the only one, that no matter how hard he tries, he cannot recreate in his mind - _Will._ Will as he is, Will as he loves him. Hollow shades, perhaps, but never enough.

Missed is not the sentiment for what he has felt.

Halved. 

“We could still go.” The words flow from his lips and makes no move to stop them, his fingers tremble, he thinks, but it’s hard to be sure of anything past Will, warm, alive, beneath his touch. “If you wanted. We could go.”

Will watches him, unable to make himself look away. Forcing himself, in fact, to watch this manifest in front of him, the breaking down of Hannibal’s boundless walls to find what lies behind them and now - here - it’s only this.

Desperation.

Want.

Love, Will knows, and the word sticks hard in his throat as he tries to swallow it down.

He knows better than not to answer, has learned that lesson in blood.

“We can’t,” Will responds, a gentleness in his voice so careful that it seems to crack beneath its own weight. He forces it to firm enough for what they both know to be true, for what there’s no sense in denying.

“It’s too late now.”

He picks up his fork and spears the eggs as brusquely as he ever has, and tries to ignore the shaking in his hand as he eats them. Something digs in him, sharp and painful, and there’s so little time left to say these things and Will wonders if perhaps saying them all will make it somehow easier, when it happens. To tear himself open in sacrifice this time, rather than have it forced on him.

“I would have. Before.”

Hannibal’s fingers tighten, slide down Will’s arm as the other moves to eat, hesitates. A perilous beat off the rhythm, a jarring grind, he cannot look away far enough. It is not shocking, to hear the sounds fall from Will’s lips, and strangely gratifying, in the most masochistic of ways, the hand they each had in their own strangulation. If he were another, tears might be shed, but instead he only chokes on the ghost of a laugh, a sob with sharp edges.

“Then hate me,” he offers, the weight of Will’s rationality suddenly incensing, blackness tainting the curl of his voice. “Destroy me, tear me as I have you. It can be my fault, all of it. If that will make it any easier.” In the moments before, before the words, before Will and his intolerable _I’ve missed you,_ Hannibal had thought himself prepared to acknowledge surrender, to take for himself one more prize and give in.

But now, now, his fingers squeeze, the idea of letting go is in itself untenable. “You would have gone and I misstepped, I hurt you, I was hurt. I hurt still and you. You do as well.” From a hiss to a whisper, hoarse. “But not this, Will, this will only hurt worse, I do not think you deserve more pain and if you think I do than mete it out, but not this, not like this.” A hollow refrain.

Not this. Not this unending separation, the inability to touch, to speak alone, to see clearly, to have little more than fleeting moments if that, to be apart, endlessly, to have nothing to dwell on but the distance. Prison does not scare him, he has readied himself for its eventuality and its own set of tortures, but to part again, now, the world seems to unseam at the concept. 

“I am frightened,” Hannibal forces his lips to move, to form the infernal words, half turns his cheek, and finds Will’s eyes. “Of being alone.” _Of being without you, again._ The thought lingers loud in the air around them. 

Mourning a loss yet to occur.

It weighs on Will, draws lines on his face and turns his stomach away even from the familiar food. Not only his own burden but more pressing, heavier still are Hannibal’s soft tones and sudden honesty, an openness that rips open wounds and salts them.

Will sets down his fork and the whole moment seems almost laughable in its absurdity, in the misunderstandings and rash decisions that have brought them both to this. This, when it might have been so much more.

“You ran,” Will intones, forming each word carefully, gaze resting unfocused on the food, somewhere far beyond the meal to its memory instead and all that followed. “I made a mistake. You made a mistake. But you ran and you had no intention of coming back. Don’t lie to me and say that you did.”

He plucks his napkin from his lap and leaves it lumped on the table. The most reaction he can manage, as feeble as it looks, when the words sit so heavy in his limbs and in his breath.

“I ran and I ran.” Agreement comes, a thunderclap. “I ran to leave the memories of us behind and when I could not run far enough. I ran so you would follow.” His fingers shift restlessly against the fabric of Will’s shirt. “And then when I could not bear that anymore, when it felt as though to go farther was only to cut irreparably deep, when I tired, in truth, of running from what I longed for most, I stopped and waited, so you would come. So I might see you.”

He has missed so unbearably, everything about the other, the frantic fluttering motions he makes, the trail of crumpled napkins and tossed clothing, the rough motions of the fork. He swallows them now, adds them carefully to his collection, nourishment for the long winter to come.

“I had no intention of coming back, no,” Hannibal finishes the thought at last. “But I always hoped one day you might run fast enough.” A pause, an attempt at a sound and the silence and again, in breathless whisper. “You never did.” 

Will’s glasses are sacrificed next at the words, set aside to better allow him to rub his hands over his eyes, to try to scrub away all of this and knowing entirely too well that it dwells not before him, but inside him. Hannibal lets go the arm he holds as he claws at himself, but moves, shifts within his awareness.

“I’ve tried to hate you,” he murmurs. “I’ve tried as hard as I can. Sometimes I do. Not often enough.”

And then touch is there again in a heartbeat, as though separation even for a blink of an eye is too much. Hannibal reaches out, stops the angry wrists with his hands and pulls them away, finds connection again, palm laying on a cheek, careful.

“You have tried to hate me.” The voice seeps with poison, hatred directed unclearly, the same suffocating tone. “And I have tried to live without you - sometimes I can, not often enough. I have been alone completely and now you are here, a blink of life, so that I may properly feel my living death.” Another hollow laugh. “But how does one turn away life and all the exquisite pain it brings?” 

A tilt of a cheek into the hand pressed against it, eyes closing. Laughter drifts and Will envisions Hannibal’s other hand pushing through his hair to hold his head in place.

A twisting jerk of movement. A clean break.

Sudden. Painless.

It doesn’t come, and Will can only slide his hand against Hannibal’s, pressing it closer to his cheek in response.

“Last time you used a knife,” he finally responds.

Nothing to do or to say. Nothing left after every potentiality and what-if and might-have-been has been driven ceaselessly into the razed earth of Will’s memory with sleepless nights and too much gin and the only person he’s ever met who can look at him and know without words or exchanges or anything but startling understanding.

“You asked me to come,” Will reminds him, not ungently. “You asked to see me and I’m here. I don’t know what you thought I could do but I can’t. Whatever it is, I can’t.” He swallows hard, pulse quick beneath Hannibal’s fingers as they trail to brush against his jaw, his neck. “I can try to make it easier for you. Books, music. I can talk to them.”

“Last time,” Hannibal sinks to his knees now, in front of the chair, suddenly too tired to stand, still tall enough to reach out and touch, to run his fingers through hair, learning the changes that time has wrought, that he has missed, that he has not been there to see, memorizing the lines once more. He mourns in the empty space of his heart, returned to him only in Will’s presence, all that will be taken still. From him, from them, the moments gone to the wind, blown away like ashes, the great collapse of the life has has clung to tenaciously despite everything. The house by the sea that somewhere he still envisions, peace, quiet, together - a space for them at last. There is the dying that has past and the dying still to come, without each other. In every instant lost, a double death then, what is and what could have been, cannot be. “I did not understand what I was sacrificing.” 

“I will go and you will not follow, and no books or music will change that, not the whole of the world has managed yet to ease that loss.” To be upright seems an impossible task but to be so far away is worse, so instead he pulls Will to the floor with him, on their knees together so he can push their foreheads against each other, can brush his lips to warm skin and press again with his fingers.

Will allows it, stays silent.

“I have asked and you have come and I have expected nothing but the way in which you have filled the empty spaces, if only to wrench them apart again. Enough sensation to keep for a time. I will go,” Hannibal murmurs. “And you will not follow, and I shall miss you with every breath, until they overwhelm or freeze. And you will go and somewhere you will remain alive, and that shall be a hope.”

Will closes his eyes. Bears the words as he bears all burdens given to him, his own and all those of others and especially - above all else - _his._ Hannibal’s words that ache with grief and even as Will swallows hard and struggles to resist them, they etch themselves inside him. Knives on skin, on muscle, on bone, carving themselves against him to never be shed.

He lifts a hand and places it against Hannibal’s cheek. Lets his thumb run soft against it, knows that too will stay with him no matter how hard he tries to forget.

Nothing to do or to say. Will leans in and closes his mouth against Hannibal’s in a lingering kiss. Soft movements, undemanding, undesiring of anything more than this touch, this closeness, aggressive in its tenderness.

An embodiment of what they know their minds share. A physical joining that will soon be denied them. Hannibal speaks of hope, Will knows, he knows and he hears it and it resonates inside him until he feels as though he’ll shake apart because he knows there is none. There is no hope and there is no future for them, not together, not as Will imagined or Hannibal envisioned.

The kiss breaks as gently as it began, with a sigh.

“I’m sorry,” breathes Will, and he means it. Sorry for everything that’s happened between them, sorry that he let anything between them happen at all. There is a pleasure in ignorance, in not knowing how it feels to be so innately understood. The fruit of the tree of knowledge, consumed irrevocably, and now forced from paradise to see if he can find anything that compares. Will knows the answer, and that he will suffer for what he’s gained.

Hannibal leans into another kiss, steals from it all that is offered, every last touch and stroke, the unbearable whole they makes as they press together, parts united, perfect and unmarred in this fleeting instant. The loveliness they could have been, the broken pieces they are. Will pulls away again, a breath of life across his cheeks, and Hannibal feels insurmountable in this moment, the clock turned back, the rough edges of his being smoothing out. There is a protein scramble on the table, as when they first met, and they are on the floor, as when they first kissed, and he will pretend they are nowhere but here long after the touches have gone. 

“Call them,” he murmurs and brings their lips back together again.


End file.
